Book report on Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater by Satoshi Hase

The notes yours truly took for this piece were almost 4 years old by the time of writing. They were taken shortly after I played through Resident Evil 2 remake back in April, 2019. By the time this is written, the remake of Resident Evil 4, aka “Leon S Kennedy Chapter 2”, would be out shortly. Many on the internet complained that the still highly playable Gamecube/Playstation 2 game does not need a remake. Well, if there were people who want another still highly playable Playstation 2 game remade even when it was less than a decade old, I say why not let Capcom’s “teenager” alone.

Don’t judge a book by its cover

Metal Gear Solid novelization is somewhat of a maze. Nothing as convoluted as that Halo affairs but not exactly straight forward either. There are 2008’s Guns of the Patriots by the late Project Itoh and Metal Gear Solid by Raymond Benson, both can be seen as tie-in novels for the PS3 exclusive that summer. Then Konami Digital Entertainment played the same trick for Ground Zeroes in 2014, with Snake Eater by Satoshi Hase published in Japan that January and Peace Walker novelization being an Amazon Japan exclusive pre-order “reward” for the paid demo disc.

Yours truly had the fortune, or maybe misfortune, to read all 4 of those above. Peace Walker is certain in the bottom for reasons I do not want to repeat here. Guns of the Patriots reeks of “fan fic” given its late author’s blogging background and “Hideo Kojima fundamentalist” statement. Benson certainly took his chance of writing MGS novel to make up for the fact that he missed writing Goldeneye novelization by one installment.

Then there is Snake Eater, an almost 600 pages long epic that made yours truly into one of those “give us a MGS3 remake” weirdoes.

On the left is the paperback of this book in Japanese. On the right, a physical copy of Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater 3D released in North America. I’m inclined to think that since that 3DS port was released in Japan with different cover, Konami thought that readers would not notice their “recycling”. I have to say that using this cover is bit of false advertisement for 2 reasons.

First the tranquilizer pistol does not appear in the book. Snake might knock someone out nonlethally in the book but he never puts someone to sleep from a distance.

Second the gun in the right hand and knife in the left hand close quarter combat statue is not in the book either. Snake hit people and throw down with his bare hand while occasionally pulls the knife out.

Rather than that, I say this is pretty good book and I am going to spoil the shit of it.

Conveniently constructed lie

Compared to other writers working on MGS series, Satoshi Haze is a novelist through and through. Snake Eater is written with detail jammed pack in to create an immersive experience. The book also took advantage of the fact that MGS’ alternative history is the same as real history on the big picture scale and gave us the following nuggets.

Nugget One

Snake and the Boss first met during the fiasco known as Korean War. Guess when Boss says he is too young to defect, she meant that the Cobra unit belongs to the Greatest Generation, aka those fought in World War Two, this lad just missed that.

Nugget Two

Dewitt Eisenhower was mentioned twice in the book. The Boss is of course described as one of his best agents during both WW2 and the Cold War. She being done dirty by US government during the so-called Red Panic (involved with a Russian and whatnot) is something General of the West regrated.

Nugget Three

Unlike how Itoh cut the whole Beauty and Beast shenanigans from his MGS4 novel (Guess he did not consider those as Hideo Kojima Fundamentalism.), the book by Hase extended the background of the Cobra Unit. Each member of this rogue gallery was given about 10 pages long back stories, seeing them as an international unit nicely separated as 3 from the Old World and 3 from the New World.

The Pain is the first from the Old World with a backstory taking up 8 pages. He came from a family of Jewish bee keepers, resided in Ottoman Empire then moved to Austria. The family served a secret society.

The Fear is the second from the Old World with a backstory taking up 10 pages. He came from a family of French hunters with unique physique. The fight against the Fear is also very different from the game. Instead of a one-on-one dual, Snake is hunted by the Fear and 10 other soldiers. It’s a bloody affair in which Snake knifed a lot of them included the Fear himself.

The End is ironically the first from the New World with a backstory taking up 9 pages. The old man is said to be born in the 1850s and participated in the U.S Civil War on the Confederate side. He taught the Boss when she was a teenager and was the co-founder of Cobra unit. The fight against the End in the book went straight to the Konami code solution. Snake asked the support team to pull all the resource to locate the ancient sniper and just shot him.

The Sorrow is the third from the Old World with a backstory taking up 9 pages. The backstory takes the place of the boss fight where Snake had to fake his death. As the only Russian on the team, he was born in 1919, orphaned by the post revolution Russian civil war. He met the Boss during the Spanish Civil War and of course those 2 later became lover. The Sorrow and Volgin were on opposite sides in Soviet internal struggle.

The Fury is the second from the New World since he is an African American who defected to Soviet Union for no one in USA would send his black ass to space. The Russian did and the landing complication was how he got disfigured. Explosive expert during World War Two.

The Boss is the third from the New World. Though the book insisted on her getting help from the Old World, since the British Major Zero did her a solid on two separate occasions. First to take care of her son Adam, late Ocelot, so she can keep do her commando shit during World War Two. Then in the post-war Red Panic, with President Eisenhower not covering her, Zero did.

Colonel Strangelove

Colonel Volgin is one of those archetypes Kojima included in those games just because the genre demands one. MGS3 is a pulpy Cold War action thriller, so a high-rank soviet military officer trying to possess a super weapon is just given. While Volgin is rather a nothing berg sadist in the game, the novel tries to make him into more of nuclear holocaust manifested.

The book opened with a flashforward to what happened to people on the ground after Volgin fired the nuke. It would give lots of horror fiction a run for their money. Volgin also had a team studying the bodies in the book.

In some ways, yours truly think Hase tried a bit too hard to justify the Metal Gear bit of this story where metal gear is only mentioned. Regarding why Volgin is electric, the book said that the red jump suit he wears is actually what made him shot lightning bolts. His scars were given by that suit as well. Also the suit is something on the way to Metal Gear…Satoshi Hase has the reputation of writing hard science fiction, he seemingly went bit too hard on that front here.

Time to talk about “Gameplay”

More than a thousand words in and I still have not talked about why the book make me want a MGS3 remake. Time to correct that oversight.

In many ways, the aspects of MGS3 do not hold up well are exactly where MGS2 does not keep up well. For one thing, as a covert operations goes, they sure talk a lot on the radio, don’t you say. Well, in the book at least a lot were talked about before Snake got on the plane, meet the team, get briefed and all that. Maybe the remake can learn from the 1998 original and make all those optional viewing rather than jamming them on top of the game like those lesser sequels did.

Another thing, Snake in the 1960s still had to kit out straight of packages in the game. MGS2 gave the acceptable bullshit that the late aughts tech locked guns to registered user while MGS3 was just programmed that way with no narrative justification. In the book, Snake jumped in with only a knife, guns are all picked up from knocked or bleed out enemies since PS2 game programming cannot limit the reality there.

It's not something totally new to MGS games either. Phantom Pains has missions branded Subsistence where a Diamond Dog commando dropped in a mission, well, naked. Still all the move sets are there, including use knife to question held up enemy. Yours truly tried all those shortly after they first read this novel and suddenly found remaking MGS3 with FOX Engine a good idea. Playing Resident Evil 2 remake factored in as well,

Final words

Still as a novelization to a not-that-well-written game (Yours truly just finished Pentiment as the time of writing, so they do think all that fondly about “Kojima writing”.), this book inherits all its faults, including how when characters talk recent events to them, the dialogue sounds more like awkwardly written history fiction instead of two cops shooting the shit (I mean Pentiment is mostly about people shooting the shit). EVA’s monologue practically close the book. But it’s all fault of Kojima and crew instead of the author Hase. He did his best to make this one an immersive ride and I would recommend it to anyone as a good thriller.